Why your company blog shouldn’t be moved to Medium
In July 2015, we moved all of our blog to Medium. We are now moving it to our website. We are moving because of business reasons. Medium is a great platform for sharing content. Here’s why we won’t be able to host our entire company blog: Tracking the sales funnel and remarketing
Our website’s main source of traffic is content. Blog posts that are interesting bring in new visitors. Some percent of these visitors try ActiveCollab and then become paying customers. The blog is a key source of traffic to the top of the funnel. We talk about our company, the product, and other topics that interest us. Our goal is to invite people to visit our blog, to let them explore our universe, to try our products, and then to subscribe to our product. We can’t track the ROI of our blog. We can’t track ROI of our blog. Without it, we can only guess at how profitable our activities are and what works. Remarketing is also not possible. We cannot serve ads on other websites to users who have come in contact with our blog. Remarketing is more effective than traditional PPC marketing as we can only serve ads to users who have come in contact with our blog.
Medium’s call for action is simple: read more content on Medium. We don’t want to be used. We want the reader to do something for our company at the end of the post, not Medium. These include: Create a free trial, Subscribe to our Newsletter, Download an ebook, and so forth. The solution was to either include an image/banner or weave a CTA into the text. Our CTA is not as powerful as Medium’s.
Users are redirected to Medium when they click the Blog link from our website. This “change of the universe” was first noticed with our Help section. It is separate from the website and has its very own theme. The Help section was not designed to look like the rest. This caused a disruption in the user’s mental model of our website and made it difficult for them to return to the main website. Although we tried to mitigate the problem, it was still a serious problem. Medium hosts the blog, but you can’t alter the theme. It is possible that visitors who left may never return. You have to accept that visitors who have left may never return. Or maybe Medium swallowed them up in links.
A blog should help build a company’s brand, authority, and not Medium’s. It should be part of activecollab.com. We are the ones who actively create quality content. The higher our domain authority, the better our ranking in search results. Engaging and interactive content should be ours.
We can make the blog more appealing by hosting it. We can be more creative and present ideas in a better way if we host the blog. It doesn’t have to be in the format Medium supports. You can arrange it differently, sort it, and make it interactive. Some posts will work better without these constraints. Medium can’t publish content like Bloomberg’s “What is Code”. Even more ambitious posts can be made easier to read with Javascript and custom styles.
